On Wednesday 20 June 2007 08:53, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Ubuntu has Fast user switching, as does any other distro that uses a recent version of Gnome, KDE may have implemented something similar as well.
However it sounds like what you really want to be using is workspaces (I think KDE may call them virtual desktops)
These have been with Unix/Linux since pretty much the dawn of the GUI and I think Apple have something called "spaces" which does a similar thing.
But essentially you have a number of desktop areas (usually 4 but it can be changed) which you can switch to and from easily using a keystroke or a small applet at the bottom of the screen called a pager, the pager can also show the window outlines of each screen so at a glance you can see which of your desktop areas are empty.
I and I suspect many others tend to use this in a very similar way to how you describe, so I will have things like email, irc and skype on one desktop, open office with a half written document on another, perhaps some long running copy operation or download running on a 3rd and so on.
Yes, I certainly do this.
This actually started me thinking of going back to the idea with minimal programs loaded. I asked Adrian if he's ever thought of using FUS as context-switching. "No," he said. He has different contexts: work, social, climbing, &c, but the immediacy of having e-mail immediately available pulling everything together and the fact that you don't see the e-mail coming in from the other acct means that trying to organise it the way I was thinking of, wouldn't work.
Have been trying it as 'geek fun', but actually fear Adrian may be right, because the 'oops, in wrong context, e-mail this to the other acct' thing is all too easy to achieve.
Would you advise me to keep trying it as a playful geeky thing or get in the habit of having everything on my main acct because of this real-world 'notification' issue that Adrian pointed out?
Regards, Ruth
I find that simple virtual desktops (not FUS) work very well for creative writing - moving the distractions off the screen etc. can be very useful. That's bad creative writing, mind you - YMMV.
Where I've use a separate account for writing, however, that's really *because* it's slightly less convenient for distractions - ie fast user switching is quite slow, or if I want to sign into my instant messenger or work on that python problem I'm itching to solve, it's not done by absent-mindedly clicking the icon etc.
I still use separate accounts for testing desktop apps - they sometimes like to interact with apps or mung data. To keep in touch with my own apps I use su -l runlevelten then run kmail &, amarok &, kopete & and so on and pop them on desktop 3 - I still get my alerts/mails in realtime from my other account, reasonably insulated from the desktop I'm running, and instantly reachable. Most desktop environments seem to let you do stuff like this.
Maybe something like that would suit you?
Regards.
*A different theme for each account doesn't hurt either, I use a nice purple one to differentiate my "real" account.